White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the New Haven and New York-based artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez. This is Rodriguez’s first solo exhibition.

For his White Room exhibition Rodriguez will present a discrete group of recent paintings produced over the past twelve months.

In his works Rodriguez encourages a push-pull between an image’s legibility and the various points at which it loses coherence and becomes (partially) obscured. Emerging from an intensive drawing practice – which is often evident as a loose ‘structure’ in the subsequent painted works – Rodriguez’s paintings tend to begin as depictions of everyday, vernacular scenes from his and his family’s life. (e.g. Rodriguez’s children are recurring characters in the work.) Only in the process of making the painted images do these scenarios begin to lose ‘focus’, becoming illegible – obliterated even – through a process of painterly deconstruction.

The raw materiality in Rodriguez’s paintings evokes the outsider-ish mannerisms of an artist such as Forrest Bess or the 1940s era works of Francis Picabia, and his deft graphic approach suggests debts to both Paul Klee and Picasso, for example. Rodriguez’s works seem to absorb these and other historical departure points rather than self-consciously mirror them, creating in turn works that are decidedly idiosyncratic, hard to categorize or adequately describe. This ‘elusive’ aspect of his work – already announced in its often hard-to-fathom subject matter - creates in turn an elastic and porous space for the artist to explore the potential and possibilities for painting itself.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez currently lives and works between New Haven, CT and New York. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2007, and a BFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2005.

We would like to thank Ella Kruglyanskaya for introducing us to Rodriguez’s work.

For further information about this project, contact: info@whitecolumns.org